Applying the FMS Model DVD Reflection

So I guess it will be 2 years ago this summer when I had one of the biggest highlights of my professional career, at least in terms of recognition. At the Friday evening social at the Perform Better Summit, where I clearly remember wearing one of my Green Lantern t-shirts, Gray Cook arrived probably an hour or so into the event with a Fiji water in hand.

Old Times

It was not a few minutes when he then told me that he had included me in the Expansion Team roster in Movement that was set to come out a few months later.
I’m still to this day beamingly proud when it is more like I that should be thanking the likes of Gray, Lee, and Coach Boyle and so many others that have allowed me a platform and the confidence to do what I do today.

So obviously I’m an FMS guy since being exposed to it when I was with the Sixers in 2005. I certainly hadn’t half the clue I have today in utilizing the FMS then; in fact I didn’t even screen the guys. Just ran the correctives as I saw fit.
And since then, the algorithm has probably changed 3 or 4 times, the SFMA has entered into the picture even though it is really the older brother of the FMS, and I’ve learned what I now know as dozens of methods.
I say methods as these are the exercises, the manual therapies, the tools that all live underneath the System of the FMS. It has become clearer as the recent messages have gotten louder, but the essence of the Functional Movement Screen is simply that it is one piece of the Functional Movement System on Screening, Testing, and Assessing. The FMS is the Screen. The Y-Balance is the Test, and the SFMA is the Assessment.

Watching this DVD from Gray’s Precon at the PB-Long Beach Summit left me pleased that the veterans of the system as well as the ardent naysayers can watch it unfold from tip to tip and see what the FM System is and what it isn’t.
Because in the end, it is far less restrictive than it appears, and whatever tools you have, however you train people all fit perfectly under this system. And you can use your own 7 moves if you want to.

It really irks me that so many people say they don’t like the FMS, it doesn’t tell you everything, the research says this, it doesn’t say that, when in the end, I think everybody really is using the Functional Movement System and maybe just crafting a different Screen, a different Test, or a different Assessment.
The struggle is more with that the message being one of restriction falling onto folks that are either not receptive to being told what not to do or simply a weaker standard for training, or even worse just jealous that somebody else came up with something so simple, so excellent, and is making a whole gang of money off it.

There’s no shame in hitching your wagon up to someone, especially when that someone is a genius, a clairvoyant, and an individual that will boost you up to the ledge or reach down to help you get over the wall.
I aspire one day to have others feel this way about me.